Nigel Mansell - Mansell - My Autobiography

We raised £6000 from the sale of the house and added another £2000 from the sale of some personal items. We were staking everything we had. I took the money to March, who had promised to help me if I could get enough cash together to start the season. They were confident that they would pick up enough backing along the way to mount a challenge.

The season started well. I was on pole position for the first race and came through to finish second behind Nelson Piquet. Little did we realise at the time that our careers would become closely linked in years to come.

On race morning I was practising standing starts on the Club straight when I was approached by two people. One of them I recognised as Peter Windsor, an Australian journalist working at the time for Autocar magazine. Peter introduced the other man to me as Peter Collins, another Australian, who had a job at Ralt cars, but who was soon headed for the Lotus Formula 1 team as assistant team manager. We chatted for a while and I think that they were both impressed by my single-mindedness. They told me years later that they had never encountered anyone at that stage of his career who had such a clear focus on where he wanted to get to. We hit it off immediately and they said they would keep an eye on my progress. It was to prove one of the most important meetings of my life so far.

The Silverstone race was an encouraging start, but after that, things went downhill fast. It was a very poor car and although I’d been able to hustle it around Silverstone for that first race, I couldn’t get it going quickly anywhere else. March blamed me. I knew that it wasn’t me who was at fault. I did four more races and picked up some minor placings but all too soon I was told that the money had run out. They had found no backing, so that was it. End of season. Close the door on your way out.

Rosanne and I were devastated. We had blown everything in six weeks and there was nothing left. We had hit rock bottom.

John Thornburn,Nigel’s team manager in Formula Ford: ‘Alan McKechnie and I had decided to take a break from motor racing after a bad experience with a sponsor. Then Nigel showed up. When I realised that he was winning races with a car which we knew had a twisted chassis, I decided to go and have a look at him racing. I went down to Thruxton and stood on a couple of corners and it was obvious that he was very special. He was bearing everybody in an old nail of a car. So we decided to help. We used to turn up with the McKechnie Wine Company van with the race car on a trailer behind it and he’d go out and beat the pants off all these kids in state-of-the-art cars with huge transporters. It was brilliant.’

Peter Windsor,journalist on Autocar magazine: ‘Nigel is unbelievably competitive and always had this incredible desire to succeed. When I first met him he was running ten miles a day in army boots and firing off five letters a day to sponsors. He had total commitment and talent. To my mind there was no way that the guy would fail to make it. He was always looking forward. I covered Formula 1 for Autocar and Nigel used to ask me lots of questions about how Grand Prix drivers operated, how they travelled, whether they had managers and so on. Then he’d say something like, “I’m going to be winning Grand Prix races soon and I’ll have a house in Spain. “It wasn’t a romantic notion, it was the way he wanted to live.’

7

ROSANNE

Nineteen-seventy-eight was without doubt the worst year of my life and by far the lowest time in my racing career. I had been given a lot of false promises and told I would get a lot of support and help which wasn’t forthcoming. I was bitter about it, but there was nothing I could do. In many ways the frustration was the worst part; I felt as though I was powerless to stem the flow of disasters and body blows. I wanted to take control of the situation, but I couldn’t see a way forward for my career. We needed money before we could begin to look for any solutions.

Rosanne had been the bread-winner ever since I had turned professional the year before and now I had to lean on her even more. She had a very good job and she put in all the hours that God sent. Although a lot of my time was spent looking for drives and for sponsors to pay for them, I carried on working for Peter Wall down in Cirencester, so Rosanne and I were forced to spend time apart, which put a strain on our marriage.

Although we were both very committed to getting on with what we had decided to do, namely my racing career, the awfulness of our situation began to put that commitment into question. When we were together we talked long into the night about the future. Should we abandon our plans? Should I forget about trying to be the Formula 1 World Champion and go back to engineering or should we stick to our guns, tough it out and hope that someone, somewhere would give us a break soon?

We reminded ourselves that what we were trying to do was something you can only do when you are young. We knew that eventually we would want to have children and so we needed to make the most of the opportunities now. In most jobs, you go to your office or place of work each day, do your job and if you like it and the company is happy with your work, you can do that job up until the day you retire. Before I left Lucas I would occasionally thumb through the magazine which the company sent out to all its employees. There were always photographs of people who were celebrating their retirement after years of faithful service. Sometimes the magazine would honour an old gentleman who had been with the company for 40 years. I used to look at the faces of these people and wondered how they could spend almost half a century doing the same job.

They had made their choices of what they wanted to do with their lives and, with Rosanne’s support, I had made mine. Motor racing was calling us and we knew that although we had hit rock bottom, if we didn’t dedicate ourselves even more at this time to what we believed we could do, then all the money we had lost and all the sacrifices we had made would be for nothing. It would just be a bad memory for the rest of our lives. I have never wanted the word ‘regret’ to be part of my vocabulary.

I know how competitive I am and could see that if I stopped racing now I would carry a chip on my shoulder about it for the rest of my life. We turned the situation around by looking at it in a different way. We drew positive lessons from the negative experiences we had suffered. The disasters and the knocks spurred us on to succeed and made us all the more determined not to give up.

I’m sure that there are a lot of people who, if placed in the same situation, would have given up. They would probably have stayed low for years and would have carried that bitterness and sadness through the rest of their lives. But in Rosanne I had a pillar of strength and together we managed to turn things around.

Unfortunately, renewing our commitment to racing did not put food in our mouths. This was a lean time financially. We had only Rosanne’s salary plus the few quid a week that I earned from my office cleaning sorties to Cirencester. We were caught in a trap. We had only enough money to live on and to pay the bills on our rented apartment. We so badly wanted to take a holiday or just go out for a night to cheer ourselves up, but we couldn’t afford to do anything. In the early days of our marriage, before most of the funds were channelled into racing, we used to take holidays abroad. That was out of the question now.

There was maybe an afternoon or a week during this period where we had a great time, but it was so infrequent that you almost couldn’t remember it. And usually it was something which was free, like going swimming in a lake. We had sold almost everything so we didn’t have any possessions we could enjoy. We used to spend a lot of time walking my parents’ dog on a great big park called Umberslade. We would walk for hours, chatting and playing with the dog. It became a big part of our routine because it didn’t cost anything and we could spend some quality time together relaxing, away from people and the pressures of the telephone and life in general.